Most of my current interests in linguistics stem from the
twelve years I spent as a member of the Philippine branch of the Summer
Institute of Linguistics. For the first four years (1959-63), I lived in a
fairly remote village of Bontoc, Mountain Province doing basic linguistic
research as part of the Institute’s Bible translation program. After three
years of graduate study in the then newly formed Department of Linguistics at
the University of Hawaii (1963-66), I returned to the Philippines as a
linguistic consultant for four years (1966-70), becoming more or less
acquainted with many of the more than 100 languages spoken in the country. I
had also had opportunity in 1964 to do some fieldwork on several of the Formosan
languages (i.e., the Austronesian languages of Taiwan), and gradually became
interested in the genetic relationships which characterize all of these
languages. In 1970 I joined the University of Hawai’i, bringing with me a
grant from the National Science Foundation to prepare a dictionary of the
Bontok language. I joined the Pacific and Asian Linguistics Institute (PALI),
which was later incorporated into the Social Science and Linguistics
Institute (SSLI), and later renamed the Social Science Research Institute
(SSRI). Upon the completion of the dictionary (M5)
my position was split between the Institute and the Department of
Linguistics, a situation which I maintained until my retirement in 2001.
Since retirement I have spent most of my time in Japan, presently (2008) as a
cooperating researcher with the National Museum of Ethnology (MINPAKU) in
Osaka. In 2007, I was an affiliated researcher with the International
Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden, the Netherlands, and will be a visiting
researcher in the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences of the
National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, participating in the Project
Monsoon Asia and Multi-Culturalism for one year from June 2009.

NegritoLanguages of the Philippines

My interest in comparative studies of Philippine languages
resulted in a number of research trips between 1987 and 1993, and
subsequently (most recently in 2007) to study the languages of some of the
groups of Negritos who live in Northern Luzon. The Negritos are descendants
of the pre-Austronesian populations in the Philippines who apparently, like
other Negrito groups in Southeast Asia, gave up their languages in favor of
the languages of the more technologically advanced Austronesian migrants (A27, A28).
I have claimed however that there is some substratal evidence that still
remains of their pre-Austronesian languages (A37).
Some of the Northern Luzon Negrito languages still retain very conservative
features of the Austronesian languages that they adopted (A31). Arta (A29),
for example, now with fewer than 50 remaining speakers, appears to be a
first-order subgroup of the Cordilleran language family. (A27, A28, A30, A36, A70, A72)

Terms for Rice Cultivation in the
Cordillera

Living in the mountains of Northern Luzon for many years
in one of the world-famous rice terrace areas, piqued my interest in the
antiquity of the terraces that the inhabitants there have sculpted out of
precipitous mountain sides, especially in view of the claim by some
pre-historians that rice is a relatively recent crop in the area.
Reconstruction of much of the lexicon related to rice and to the construction
and maintenance of the terraces to the parent language of the Central
Cordilleran subgroup suggests that knowledge of the crop and its cultivation
in the area goes back several thousand years, and is consistent with the
claims that rice was a staple in Proto-Austronesian times, and was brought
into the Philippines with the earliest migrants from Formosa. (A38)

The Tasaday Controversy

In 1988, while attending a conference in Zagreb,
Yugoslavia, I had the opportunity to sit in on a symposium which focused on
the Tasaday, a small group of people living in the rain forests of South
Cotabato, on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. When reports about
them first appeared in the early 1970’s, claims were made that they had been
completely isolated for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, and that they
were still living a stone-age existence in caves, unaware of the presence of
agriculturalists less than half a day’s walk away across a steep mountain
ridge. Several prominent anthropologists claimed at the symposium that the
group was a hoax perpetrated to enhance the political fortunes of a prominent
Filipino businessman and (at that time) a member of President Ferdinand
Marcos’ cabinet. Other presenters vigorously claimed the authenticity of the
group. I decided to attempt to throw light on the controversy by examining
the language used by the Tasaday. Between 1993 and 1996, I spent a total of
approximately 10 months with them and surrounding linguistic groups, and have
come to the conclusion that the Tasaday probably were as isolated as they
claim, that they were indeed unfamiliar with agriculture, that their language
was a different dialect from that spoken by the closest neighboring group,
and that there was no hoax perpetrated by the original group that reported
their existence. The length of their isolation however was probably in the range
of 5-10 generations, not in the thousands of years. (A34, A41, A42) Some of my work on the Tasaday, along
with transcriptions of cave tapes, and other materials appears in my Tasaday
website (W1, W2). A recent book by award-winning author,
Robin Hemley, Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux), provides a very readable account of the hoax
controversy, including summary statements of the linguistic evidence for
their authenticity.

The Austric Hypothesis

The possible relationship of the Austronesian language
family to other language families has interested me for a number of years.
The Austro-Tai hypothesis as proposed by Paul Benedict seemed to me to have
merit, although the key evidence presented for it has been claimed more
recently to be the result of contact between some pre-Austronesian group and
the speakers of the parent of the Tai-Kadai language family, or one of its
early descendants. The position of the Austro-Asiatic family vis-à-vis the
Austronesian family also seemed worth investigating. I examined the early
claims of Schmidt who claimed that they were related and gave the
super-family the name Austric. Although many of his claims could not be
supported, given our greater knowledge of the families involved, a careful
re-examination of the morphology of the two language families, especially
that found in Nicobarese, an isolated Mon-Khmer language, strongly suggests
that a genetic relationship between the two families does in fact exist. (A26, A35, A39, A40, A44, A57, A60, A61)

One of my current research projects is a revision of the dictionary
of the Bontok language, as spoken in the village of Guina-ang, first
published in 1976. A web-based version first appeared in 1999, but is now
completely reprogrammed and available to the public (W4). Because Bontok
language and society are undergoing rapid change as a result of the influence
of Filipino/Tagalog and also Ilokano (A58,
A77), every effort is being made to
document traditional Bontok speech and aspects of the culture. The dictionary
has sound files attached to most headwords and some example sentences to
enable the actual pronunciation to be heard. Hundreds of photos of cultural
items are also accessible through the appropriate headwords, as well as links
to large amounts of published and unpublished text materials from Guina-ang,
Bontoc. (A1, A2,
A11, A12,)